Entries for February 2009

It is our custom at work on Fridays at 4 pm to have food and drink. This custom we call “Beer O’Clock” for we are not very inventive in the naming department. Despite the name, the food is usually varied and abundant, because we are a very responsible firm and don’t want the staff getting accidentally trollied before they even leave the premises.

Yesterday I was offered some “Kiwi As” potato chips which claimed to be pie and tomato sauce flavoured. I declined.

I just do not get the appeal of a food whose value proposition is that it tastes like another food. If I wanted to eat something that tasted like a pie with tomato sauce—incidentally, I never put tomato sauce on a meat pie, and I believe it to be an Australian practise—I would jolly well eat a pie with tomato sauce, than which nothing could taste tomato saucier or more pie-like. “Pie” is the name of a food. It is not a condiment or flavouring. That is why you cannot buy pie essence at the supermarket.

Indeed, such food-that-claims-to-taste-like-other-food betrays its inadequacy in that very claim. Surely, if it were worth eating at all, it wouldn’t need to implore you saying “eat me! I taste like something else! I’m a chip, but I don’t taste like one!”

Gratified to be told by a colleague today that he heard my name and a correction read out on the radio this past Sunday, presumably as a result of the email I sent to National Radio about Richard Prebble’s repeated lying. No word on whether future Prebble interviews will be accompanied by real-time fact-checking as I suggested to them.

Didn’t catch it myself. I was being hungover in the Tararua foothills.

Well, not really. But: Kathy has been working late and weekends to get a big project through on time, and I’ve been away all weekend at a boozy wedding, and there’s stuff to get ready for the Cuba St Carnival over the next few nights, and I was going to start Acrobalance classes this week, and … the dishes are piling up, the dining table is a drift of paper, and the housework has gone undone yet again.

So I turn on the car radio in time to hear Richard Prebble claim excitably that Kiwibank has never made a profit. Chris Laidlaw then said “but surely many others around the world are in the same situation”, implying agreement.

The ministry’s investigation services head, Shaun Driscoll, said the issue was not confined to the hoki fishery. Seven major deepwater and inshore investigations in the past 12 months suggested serious long-term misreporting.

Serious long-term misreporting, eh? Well, duh. The economic incentives are solidly in favour of telling big lies and pillaging the fishery. Who’s to know when you do? All the other guys are doing it; if you do the right thing, you’re a mug.

This is why I’m quite skeptical of claims that we have a sustainably managed fishery in New Zealand. We don’t. We have an imaginary sustainable fishery, and an actual one that we don’t really know much about, but which no doubt is in a parlous condition, since catch levels are set using reports based on the imaginary fishery where all is well.

This is an industry that needs a shakeup, good and hard. It won’t happen, and eventually the rest of us will wonder where all the fish went.

Poneke notes, in the comments to a blog post about why we have trains in Wellington that don’t fit in the tunnels:

After the Ganz purchase was announced, a very senior public servant came to me and told me that:

– the contract was negotiated by an advisor in Muldoon’s office.

– after it was signed, the advisor resigned and set up in business with the agent for the trains, who had scored a deal whereby Hungary would buy New Zealand goods to the value of the trains.

– Railways wanted Japanese trains that were technically far superior as well as being stainless steel rather than inferior Corten, and would have cost $28 million as opposed to the $33 million for the Ganz trains.

I checked all these matters out and when I confirmed them, I went to Muldoon, believing he would be appalled and would have taken action.

Instead, after I described what I learned to Muldoon, he said to me in an utterly menacing tone that I have never forgotten: “If you print one word of this, I will destroy you and your newspaper”